Category: Blue linen pants

My first project in San Francisco this past week was to work on the blue linen pants I had abandoned before the Amazon trip.  Admittedly I was not sure whether the problem was a fitting issue or a construction issue and I tended to assume that the problem was caused by seamtress error, namely that I thought I had cut the right leg off grain.

On Monday I tried on the pants and asked Sandra (Betzina) to mark where the seam lines should have been on the right side.  I explained that I was going to take them apart and use the markings to draft a new pattern or at least cut new pieces for the right leg.  I had extra fabric and the existing right leg could be sacrificed.

She drew two new lines in beautiful fuschia chalk and I took the pants apart; the results are shown here:

Reassuringly, I learned that in this case the problem was not caused by an error on my part, just an asymmetricality in my basic architecture.  As you can see by looking at the red lines I needed to move the inseam forward to the front of the pant and move the outseam toward the back of the pant.  Note that the angles were not the same.

I pinned the pants together along the seam I as working on for each piece, lay my old pattern pieces over the flat linen pant pieces, and drafted new patterns to match the actual lines drawn by Sandra.    When I looked at the pattern pieces, they looked perfectly normal, but when I pinned them to the fabric, aligning the grainlines, it became evident that for the pants to hang on grain, the side seams were definitely not in the same line as the grainline of the fabric.

The new pants went together perfectly well except for a little trouble with one seam lengthening a bit because I was actually sewing a bias seam and not a straight-of-grain one, something I knew in an intellectual way but had not accomodated in actual practice.   I finished the pants on Monday and new they looked good and hung straight.

Tuesday I finished the pants:  I cut the lining, constructed it, and attached it at the waist.  I used petersham ribbon to face the inside of the waistband.

As this particular linen is rather ravelly I also felt it was better to completely attach the lining at the hem, something I often prefer to do, even though almost every sewing book I own and most instructors have not recommended this technique.  After attaching the lining I hemmed the pants with two rows of hand stitching to be sure they were well anchored.

The white layer is the fusible wigam that I used to line the hemline and add weight to the hem so the pants so they would hang well and add strength to the hem.

Finally, here I am in the finished pants.  They are really simple, and I think I will be using this pattern quite a bit.  But I seem incapable of whipping out a simple pair of pants without doing all kinds of extra work.  Pardon the wrinkles.  I had been sewing on my next project for a couple of hours by the time this was taken.

1.  Never sew when you are very tired.

2.  Never try to sew something in a big hurry at the last minute.

3.  Never sew when you are very distracted by familial craziness or other intrusions by "real life".

NEVER SEW WHEN ALL THREE ARE GOING ON AT ONCE.

The blue linen pants are fine.  There is no biasing.  I must have been standing very crooked that day. (I vaguely recall that my back was really sore for a couple of days, but now that I have relaxed on vacation that recollection seems so distant as to be lost in a fog somewhere).  I certainly refuse to sew for the crooked days, until they become the majority at least.

If I ever have time to sew again, I will pick up where I left off and finish the pants.  Thank goodness I did not trash them (but I might have trashed the lining, who can remember these things?)  Meanwhile, the problem with vacation is all the piles of things that lie waiting for your return.

No linen pants, alas!  They fit beautifully through the waist, upper hip and crotch; in short they fit very well from the crotch line up.  I thought the biasing problem on my side seams would be fixed automatically by fixing the top of the pant.  A naive thought at best.  If anything the biasing is worse.  I think I see why however and it can be partly predicted by the curve of the waistline (see patterns).  On previous pants the pant itself did not sit properly on my waist or hip so the fabric of the pant would kind of slip around so that the leg seam did not appear as biased as it may have been, but the hips or waist would pull or pucker on one side or the other.   Now with the hip straight and the side and center seams vertical and well fitting, the pants hang more crooked.  The grain is straight at each leg but the leg does not come off the hip at the right angle for it to hang straight.    I might be trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

I can see I am going to have to work on this further, and my preliminary analysis may or may not be accurate.  The advantage to the one seam pants is there is no side seam to analyze so if the pants hang crooked who would know.  When I made striped one-seams, I ended up taking very strange looking curved, hooked, and almost horizontal darts in places to get the stripes to hang straight.  I never worried about this figuring that getting it to look good was the important part, not how I got there.

Well the whole process will have to wait two weeks for my return from the Amazon Cruise.   All I can think is that when this whole process is over I will have a much better understanding of patterns and drafting and my own body.  I may never be able to sew for regular people again.

Here is a picture of the projects that await my return:

Ziplexia:  one of the many forms of dyslexia in which the afflicted person is incapable of figuring out which way to install an invisible zipper so that the outside of the zipper is lined up on the outside of the pants.

As you may be able to surmise, no pants have been sewn.  Both pairs are still stacked neatly on the end of the ironing board smiling expectantly every time I walk into the sewing room.  We still hope that construction is in their immediate future although given the time constraints they may remain in limbo, neither pant nor mere fabric for some time.

Yesterday I attempted to start the linen pants and lined up the invisible zipper, put in the zipper foot and started to sew.  Four stitches later my lovely Bernina stopped and flashed me a very ominous message "main motor failed, check hook system".  It didn’t sound good but I did find the appropriate action in the manual and I cleaned and lubricated the hook.  Still the sewing machine did not work.  Same message.  I see that the nice Bernina will be going to the hospital on Monday.

I set up the Elna and promptly sewed in the invisible zipper, upside down.  This is not unusual.  I have put in how many invisible zippers over the years, hundreds? Thousands?  I have probably put 90 % of them in backwards before gettting them right. 

I can only assume that my general zipper failure is related to my mild variant of dyslexia where I have trouble telling right from left.  In order to say "turn right" I have to first look at my hands and figure out which is my right hand so that I know I am saying to turn the correct direction.  Unfortunately zippers are not this simple.  I can’t look at my hands.  I do look at the fabric; I look at the zipper; I put them together and imagine zipping up the zipper; then I sew it in backwards.  Yesterday, between the sewing machine and the zipper I decided that the goddess of sewing was not smiling on me and moved on to other things.

Today, I have sewn the zipper in backwards, twice.  How can I do that you ask?  Once, yes, take it out, turn it over and it should work.  Not so.  Who can tell how my twisted mind works.  Well I am ready to keep trying.  Three’s a charm they say.

I finished pressing and prepping all my fabric last night.  Now everything is ready to cut and sew and the patterns are ready as well.  I have changed my mind again about the linen pants, I think I will just make a separate lining.  That is so fast and easy I see no reason to mess with a different technique.

I also washed the aqua pebble weave knit.  This piece did not have the same biasing problem that the periwinkle pebble weave had.  That piece must have been an aberration, but at least it worked out.